Our journey- from 8 week old pup, to agility dog, school dog, and trickster. Training thoughts, tips and lots of problem solving, photography and general musings on owning a silly and serious paradoxical Aussie Shepherd.

Blogroll

priors

Meta

career

That could be me. I’d wear a hard hat and everything. Even a shirt. Look out, world.

I took Monday off as a personal day and I lazed around the house and took Lu & Loki on an afternoon walk, and I thought, not for the first time, about what my future would be like.

I’ve never considered myself as a teacher forever. I feel like I need more than that, but I don’t really know what.

And how can I make enough money and work strange hours so I can walk and train the dogs every day for a couple of hours? Now that would be pretty cool. I need some job where I can work mornings, then come home, play with the dogs, and then like, teach people to train their dogs in the early evening. Then have dinner, then go to bed. I could deal with that. Or just be earning enough to work mornings… or afternoons… and have the rest of the day off.

Maybe I’d like to be an engineer. They seem like the kind of logical, problem-solving type people I could associate with. As a teacher, my problem-solving skills are limited to the abstract. How can you solve a problem when the problem is a person, and the person has, say, a learning disorder? Or how can you solve the problem of, say, teaching kids to read, when in essence that’s 27 (or in our case 53) individual problems making up the larger problem? And what if they’re not problems but people who need time and nurturing but I’m too impatient and want to see if my solutions work now?

But I don’t think I’d like to go back to school to be an engineer, and I’m not very good at maths and I’m pretty sure that engineering would involve maths.

A website about engineering talks about biomedical engineering and says: “By integrating physical, chemical, mathematical, and computational sciences with engineering principles…” all those things make me want to gag.

Now, a civil engineer… that’s something. Designing roads so people don’t get in traffic jams or smash into each other? I find that stuff cool. When I used to play SimCity, I would obsessively upgrade and fix roads rather than worrying about much of the other stuff in the game – I loved the roads. But then, if they’d need me to build a bridge or a dam as a civil engineer… well.. no, that could be interesting.

There’s a kind of engineering called Photonics, which just reads like a fancy word for “magic”: Photonics is the science of generating, controlling, and detecting photons especially in the visible light spectrum.

Ok. So it seems like as far as engineers go, I think ‘civil’ would be the way to go.

What else? I could become a researcher and university lecturer. I’d like to find things out about things. Like what makes schools good, or teachers, or why teacher education courses suck, or how to make parents read to their kids more, or how to optimally teach kids to spell, or why some kids ‘get’ maths and others don’t even if they’ve had the same education, and whether team teaching is effective for student learning, and what the actual cost (not monetary) of standardised testing and teacher ranking systems are. See, I could research. Now I already have a Masters degree, so that’s a bonus, but I suppose I’d need to go further and start doing a doctorate or something, and that sounds expensive (??) unless they’re paying you to do it, I suppose. I’d also still be teaching people stuff though it seems like at University you can just talk at people and show them a PowerPoint and expect them to learn so you don’t have to do much teaching. Maybe that’d be something to research: Why do university teaching courses teach in a method completely contradictory to what they’re wanting their students to be able to do?

Of course, I’d word it better than that.

So far: civil engineer, University Lecturer. What else?

Well, having spent the last half an hour doing career quizzes, seems like that’s about it. One suggested “inventor”, like you just pack up your bags and decide to invent stuff for a living.

That same one also listed civil engineer, and ‘environmental planner’ – I wonder if they’re the same thing. And curriculum designer. Yuck.

Oh, or how about for something completely left of field like event planning? I relish planning. Give me a holiday or a wedding and I’ll be there with timelines and things booked, and how long the bus will take from a to b and when we need to be getting to x location. I guess that’s sort of like civil engineering but on a more superficial scale. Like, you have to plan roads… OR… plan bridal showers. Totally the same thing.
Maybe event planning would allow me to work from home and therefore take the dogs for hikes.

Oh, but events happen on weekends.

And weekends are agility times.

Yuck.

Ok, who can just give me enough money to live off so I can just do this stuff? I’ll work half days even, as long as the rest of the time I can do dog things. Not too much to ask, right??